Scalise: Experience Getting Shot ‘Fortified’ My Support for Second Amendment

House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R., La.) said Tuesday that his experience getting shot this summer has only fortified his belief in the Second Amendment.

Scalise, who was shot during a Republican baseball practice in June and was in critical condition before recovering, told Fox News host Martha MacCallum that guns saved his life that day.

"Inevitably questions about the Second Amendment are raised by what happened in [the Las Vegas mass shooting] … Have you, your experience of your own, and what you saw in Las Vegas, has it changed how you feel about any of that?" MacCallum asked.

"I think it's fortified it because first of all you've got to recognize that when there's a tragedy like this, the first thing we should be thinking about is praying for the people who are injured and doing whatever we can to help them, to help law enforcement. We shouldn't first be thinking of promoting our political agenda," Scalise said.

Scalise then argued that calls for gun control following these shootings don't take the facts into account.

"And I think we see too much of that where people say ‘OK, now you have to have gun control.' First of all, look at some of those bills—those bills wouldn't have done anything to stop this. That gunman actually cleared background checks so to promote some kind of gun control is the wrong way to approach this," Scalise said.

Scalise credited the Capitol Police for saving his life and said ordinary citizens protect themselves with guns every day.

"Regular citizens that just have a passionate belief in the Second Amendment that have their own guns use guns every single day to protect themselves against criminals," Scalise said.

He said that these stories are underrepresented.

"And those stories never get told or hardly ever get told. But that's a different side of the story that I think is important," Scalise said.

Conor BeckEmail Conor | Full Bio | RSSConor Beck is a Media Analyst for the WFB. He's previously written for The College Fix, Life News, and was a Student Free Press Association Fellow for The Weekly Standard. He graduated from Rice University in 2017.